Data has redefined the marketing game in the last decade. Before, marketers would pump content out to their chosen medium and judge its success based on any increase in sales. Now, they sit on top of a pile of data that can tell them exactly how their campaigns are performing.

But is this ocean of data putting the focus of modern marketing too heavily on analysis, measurement and insight at the cost of creativity?

This seems to be a common view, according to a survey of 250 marketing decision-makers, with 72%...

New research provides further evidence that marketers are missing the mark when it comes to personalisation. According to Epsilon’s report, there is often a disconnect between marketers and the consumers they are trying to reach, centring around a misunderstanding of what the latter actually want from personalisation.

In a survey of consumers, the company found that 32% want brands to customise their...

The UK’s digital advertising industry should take greater steps to self-regulate, according to a newly published report from the House of Lords Communications Committee.

The advertising industry is seen as a success story of the last few decades. The UK advertising in a digital age report claims that the UK is a global hub for the ad industry, adding £120 billion and over 1 million jobs to the economy in 2016.

The industry is, however, in a state of flux. Evidence given to the committee in the last few weeks...

Despite the relative anonymity of the internet and ecommerce transactions, some people can still be a little uncertain when it comes to making certain more, ahem, risqué purchases.

The adult retail industry (think lingerie and adult gifts) has some fairly unique challenges when it comes to new customer acquisition. The main factor at work here is first time buyers being worried about whether or not the purchase is ‘normal’ and whether they should be embarrassed or ashamed about...

Business leaders at large multinational companies that work with marketing firms are still mostly relying on Agencies of Record (AOR). A new survey carried out by the Economist Intelligence unit for Globality asked 307 multinational business leaders with annual turnovers of £1bn, finds that 58% currently use an AOR.

But, as many companies face pressure to create more value from their marketing strategies, many are beginning to move away from large agencies and towards smaller specialists. 66% of those...

Both Facebook and Instagram have made changes that will limit the amount of data that third-party developers can access, as the company is still reeling from the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The news came as a shock to many developers, especially the scale of the changes. Instagram has instituted a 96% cut to how often software developers can pull data from its API for mobile apps. The API now allow permits third-party apps to request 200 data updates an hour, down from the previous 5,000.

Apple has provided details on a number of new privacy features it will be rolling out in order to comply with the incoming GDPR regulations.

CEO Tim Cook said that the company would be implementing the four privacy management tools so that consumers have the ability to obtain a copy of their data, can request a correction of data and deleting or deactivating their account.

The tools will be available on the Apple ID account page in the EU in May, before they are rolled out globally. Cook said that aside from...

Spotify seems to have got through its first day of trading as a public company without any major disasters. The company had looked to avoid the big theatrics that can characterise an IPO with a launch that was different in a number of key ways.

The launch didn’t involve the traditional roadshow for investors, the company did not hire any banks to stabilise the price and it did not force existing shareholders to agree to a lock up period.

According to Acast, the podcasting boom is still well underway, with a survey of 1,335 adults showing that 23% had listened to at least one in the last month.

The company has launched a quarterly Audio Intelligence report to rack audio consumption habits in the UK, US and Australian markets.

“This research is crucial to understanding where the industry is headed,” said Susie Warhurst, UK Director of Content. “The more we know about how people behave and what they think, the better we can...

Students are often portrayed as hyper-connected to the world around them through social media, unable to go anywhere without flashing a quick selfie and unable to eat out without logging a couple of artistically filtered shots of their food.

This perception could, however, turn out to be a little off the mark. The last few years have see the shine come off the social media craze of the last decade, with many people beginning to wonder if constant connection to your peers can have negative side...

The majority of advertisers think that being able to more effectively measure the success of campaigns would allow them to justify additional investment in programmatic.

Infectious Media surveyed 214 decision-making marketers who are engaged in programmatic and have budgets of over $100,000. The respondents had programmatic remits in EMEA, APAC or North America, and 90% agreed that better measurement would make justifying increased investment easier.

New research by Verve has shown that consumers are twice as likely to engage with mobile ads that utilise location data then they would with generic ads.

The company surveyed 2,000 UK adults also found that mobile ads related to user hobbies and interests perform much better than generic mobile ads. Of those surveyed who have engaged with mobile ads, 33% said they would engage with one that was related to something or somewhere they planned for the future.

Brands that sell products to children need to make sure that they understand the “dramatically shifting” environment that young people are growing up in.

20,000 UK children were surveyed as part of the latest Future Forecasts report form the research agency Kids Insights. Among the key changes that brands need to consider are technological changes, the evolving demands of younger consumers, the rise of YouTube stars and the increasing demand for gender neutral products.

Ads can be annoying, especially on mobile. But, according to research IAB UK the main source of annoyance for consumers using mobile is not the ads themselves, but the fact that a lot of them aren’t optimised for the format.

12,000 UK adults were asked about their feelings towards mobile advertising, and the vast majority of them are in favour of ads in order to keep online content free. 84% prefer ads to paying for an ad-free experience.

As online companies continue to exert an ever greater influence over the consumer products market, a new trend has emerged that could be dangerous for unprepared retailers. The last year has seen companies like ASOS, Topman and schuh introduce try-before-you-buy options for consumers.

ASOS is a leading pioneer of this kind of approach, introducing their try-before-you-buy initiative in November 2017 in partnership with payment company Klarna. The scheme, which has been adopted by other retailers, allow...

Technology is not only changing the way that brands interact with their customers, it also seems to be opening a gig generational gap between customers themselves. New research from Narvar and YouGov shows that contacting a company via email is falling out of favour with younger consumers.

The survey of 2,994 UK consumers, all of whom had bought something online in the previous six months, showed that millennials are 20% less likely to contact a retailer via email than baby boomers.

GDPR is getting really close now, and a new report by Forrester suggests that only a small minority of B2B marketing confident that their organisation is currently fully compliant with the new requirements.

The company interviewed 66 B2B marketing professionals in January and found that 15% think that are completely ready for implementation day on May 25. 18% have not yet settled on a strategy going forward, while the majority consider themselves to be partially ready.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has realeased the results of its meta-analysis into the effectiveness of digital display advertising campaigns.

The report, created in collaboration with Kantar Millward Brown, OnDevice Research and Research and Analysis of Media (RAM), looked at the results from 675 individual campaigns from 2008 through to 2017.

The metrics used to measure how well campaigns performed were brand awareness, brand perception, education and sales intent.

Over the weekend, Twitter suspended a number of accounts to a violation of its spam rules and for copyright issues. Some of the accounts, which included @GirlPosts, @SoDamnTrue and @commonwhitegiri, were hugely popular.

GirlPosts, for example, had 9.8 million followers and was listed by Statweestics as the sixth most popular account of 2017, beating out such notables as CNN, Fox News and Harry Styles. The account was pulling in around 20 million likes and six million...

Google has detailed the type of ‘bad ads’ that it targeted for removal from its platform in 2017. The data was released as part of the company’s fifth annual report on ads that violated its conditions.

The company claims to have removed over 3.2 billion ads in 2017, way up from the 700 million it reported in 2015. That equates to over 100 ads being taken down per second.

The main type of bad ads targeted for removal were websites duplicating content from other sites (12,000), tabloid...